Meet ModSolar, Building the Operating System for the Solar Industry, at InterSolar North America Booth #8737 in San Francisco, July 8th to 10th

Ardmore, Pennsylvania – July 8, 2014 – One of the rising stars of the solar industry, ModSolar, which is changing the solar industry by creating the software and processes that make the industry more effective and efficient, is exhibiting at this week’s InterSolar North America, today through Thursday at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

The team from ModSolar, including the company’s co-founder and President, Mike Dershowitz, will be exhibiting in booth #8737, with demonstrations and presentations throughout the conference.

The emergence of ModSolar begins with a total cash investment of $3,500 in 2011. Today the company stands on the cusp of being an industry leader with no outside funding just three years later.

For Dershowitz and Kevin Ilsen, it’s a remarkable story of finding an unfulfilled need in a growing industry and taking the plunge.

The company they co-founded, ModSolar, is based in the Philadelphia suburbs but has rapidly grown a national reputation as the innovative leaders in software and technology solutions for solar providers.

“ModSolar is changing the way the solar industry works,” said Dershowitz. “We are bringing efficiency to previously time-consuming processes, with an all-in-one, comprehensive platform that features our patent-pending, solar panel layout technology, and a growing platform that now includes financing options and contract generation.”

ModSolar’s software enables solar providers to produce solar proposals and contracts in less than five minutes, including the placement of panels on an image of the prospect’s roof, as well as the calculation of the return on the solar investment. ModSolar develops software that dramatically reduces the “soft costs” involved in solar sales, solar system design, production of high-quality solar proposals, and all the paperwork surrounding solar installations.

Currently, $20 million per day in solar contracts are being generated through ModSolar’s software platform, representing an estimated five percent of the solar market in the United States. Hundreds of ModSolar users produce over 1,500 solar proposals each week. ModSolar’s corporate clients include SunEdison, Enphase Energy, GAF,Hudson Solar and Southern Energy Management.

And the numbers are growing every day for ModSolar, with additional products and services in the pipeline and more customers signing up.

Building the “Operating System for the Solar Industry” didn’t just happen overnight – although sometimes it seems like it.

Dershowitz was working as a Design Manager at JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the U.S. There, he established the mobile design department, where he led a team of amazingly talented individuals and together, created award-winning, industry changing products for the banking industry.

While attending a home show in Philadelphia with his wife in early 2011, Dershowitz was struck by the lack of sales technology being employed by the home improvement industry. After inviting a dozen or more solar installers in to discuss the details of solar for his own home (as an avid supporter of renewable energy), he continued to be surprised at how little sales technology was being used.

“At that show, I spoke to over a dozen solar installers about setting up something at my house,” Dershowitz said. “I’ve always been a supporter of renewable energy, but I just couldn’t believe how little sales and marketing technology these companies were using at that time>”

To guide the software development process, Dershowitz reached out to a friend, Kevin Ilsen. Ilsen spent 11 years at McKesson, the nation’s largest provider of products, software and services to the healthcare industry, where he most recently served as Chief Architect of the Horizon Clinical Professional Services team. During his years there, he had worked closely with many major hospitals developing interactive systems for their physicians, as wells as portals for cancer patients and those with chronic kidney disease.

In the summer of 2011, Dershowitz and Ilsen came up with prototype software, which they took to a local home show. The prototype enabled customers to see their house (through satellite images) with the layout features of solar panels on a computer screen for the first time. The prototype proved popular at the small home show, and the pair realized it was a product that was needed by the solar industry.

Both left their corporate jobs that fall, and started ModSolar, using a $3,500 cash advance on Dershowitz’s credit card. They quickly began adding customers, and refining the software, growing the platform and exhibiting their ModSolar software platform at industry events around the country throughout 2012 and 2013.

The ModSolar software platform takes the previously complex process of planning, selling and financing solar system installations (which previously took over eight hours to perform) and simplifies it to a process that takes approximately three minutes.

ModSolar’s platform is a cloud-based proposal generation system, which currently includes features such as ModSolar’s patent-pending panel layout technology; energy usage and payback, which provides an instant analysis of customer return on investment; proposal generation; financing options; lead generation and qualification with lists of solar-ready homes with qualified owners; CRM integration; and custom software development.

With 15 employees on staff and more on the way, ModSolar’s offices in Ardmore are humming with activity, serving their growing client base and garnering significant data on the solar industry in the United States each day. ModSolar is also hard at work on enhancements to their technology platform, as well as additional services that will be rolled out over the course of the next six months.

About ModSolar:

ModSolar’s software lets solar providers produce solar proposals and contracts in less than five minutes, including placement of panels on an image of the prospect’s roof, as well as calculation of the return on the solar investment. ModSolar develops software that dramatically reduces the “soft costs” involved in solar sales, solar system design, production of high-quality solar proposals, and the related paperwork surrounding solar installations. Hundreds of ModSolar users currently produce over 1,500 solar proposals each week. Additional information is available at http://www.ModSolar.net.